


Mission Control (The Professor Angell Remix)

by elementalv



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-10
Updated: 2010-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elementalv/pseuds/elementalv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney is hanging on by a thread.</p><p><b>Note:</b> The deaths mentioned are part of the backstory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mission Control (The Professor Angell Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chaletian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaletian/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Don’t Call Him Alien Spawn!](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/674) by chaletian. 



> Malnpudl is an awesome beta, and I love her for helping to tighten this puppy up.

These days Rodney laughs when he thinks about his life too deeply or for too long. It’s a thin, bitter kind of laugh, but it’s the only one he has left, so if someone doesn’t like it, they can go elsewhere. And that includes Sheppard, because no matter how much he wants it to be otherwise, Sheppard isn’t the same man. It sucks, and it isn’t the way Rodney would have liked his life to turn out, but he really doesn’t have a say about that anymore, and honestly, he doesn’t have the time to worry about it. He has much bigger things on his plate, including, right now, the gateroom.

He looks down the steps and at the gate, and before he thinks better of it, he screams, “ARE YOU TRYING TO —” He bites off the remainder of that question. For one thing, he’s not sure he knows what he was going to ask, and for another, he’s not sure he knows who (or what) might answer. All things considered, a little judicious self-censorship never hurt anyone. These are words to live by, and he has ever since he figured out that Kavanagh was the first.

Not that anyone realized it at the time. All he or anyone else knew was that Kavanagh was having trouble sleeping and kept begging Carson — Rodney’s thoughts stutter at the memory of Carson, but then he forces himself to think about Kavanagh again, because that’s considerably less painful — and. And. And it’s a moment before Rodney can pick up where he left off thinking about Kavanagh, and his insomnia, and his near-constant harassment of Carson for something better than Tylenol P.M. or Xanax or any of a dozen other drugs that were supposed to help a person sleep. Because in the midst of all that whining, Kavanagh knew something, and that day, that last day, Rodney is convinced he tried to tell them all what he knew. All these months later, Rodney is convinced of it, and he’s equally convinced that Kavanagh left behind some trace of what he knew, even though Rodney has never found it, despite all that time searching.

And because Rodney can’t find it, he turns around blames Kavanagh for his own blindness. He thinks that if the mealy mouthed son of a bitch had had any trace of testosterone in his system, he would have done something more, anything, to warn the rest of the expedition about what was happening to him, to tell someone about his suspicions. Instead, he’d gone down to the gateroom during Delta shift, used some idiotic excuse to dial a space gate, then stepped right through, as if he were taking a walk through the park.

Rodney wants to call him a coward for that, but he can’t, because honestly? Rodney isn’t brave enough to do the same thing, and he wants to. God, he wants to more than anything in the world. But he doesn’t, and he won’t. There’s too much going on here in Atlantis for him to be able to simply walk through a gate and hope for a clean death.

“DAMN IT, SHEPPARD, DON’T —”

He really needs to stop screaming, and he needs to stop doing it now. Bad enough that he might capture the wrong attention, but Katie Brown and Laura Cadman are starting to look at him oddly. In some ways, they’re more dangerous than — “SHEPPARD!”

Sheppard turns toward Rodney with slightly vacant eyes, and Rodney’s gut cramps up with the familiar realization that he’s probably never going to see John again. Not the John he knew, the one who used to tease Rodney and make him think that maybe one day, the two of them could — could — He swallows hard at the thought, because instead of that, he’ll be stuck with this second-rate Sheppard who never quite manages to live up to the original. Rodney hates it when this happens, when he remembers what he spends so much time repressing, because it means that he’s slipping up again, and he can’t. He can’t do that with so much on the line.

“What’s wrong, Rodney?”

“YOU CAN’T —” Rodney clears his throat and forces himself to speak in a more moderate tone. “You can’t let it — let him run around like that. You never know when the gate might activate.”

It’s a lie. Rodney disabled the gate roughly a year ago, when Sheppard started treating the gateroom like a playroom. No one in the city can figure out why the gate doesn’t work properly anymore, why they can’t leave, and it’s unlikely they ever will. These days none of them has enough mental capacity to figure out that a) the problem was deliberately induced and b) Rodney is the one who caused it. Instead, they’ve taken to fishing off the pier for food, and Botany has finally started to make itself useful by supplying edible food for everyone.

Not that they’ll be able to do so for very much longer. Rodney disabled much of the hydroponics a month ago, and their crops are starting to die because of it. Starvation is a pretty horrible way to go, he thinks, and he would much rather blow up the city, the way he blew up the _Daedalus_ and _Apollo_, the way he’ll blow up the _Phoenix_ if they ever get around to finishing it.

Unfortunately, Atlantis can’t be blown up. She’s been strengthened in odd and subtle ways, and Rodney knows he was lucky he managed to sabotage food production before Atlantis could protect it, the way she’s learned to protect her other systems. He wishes he could explain to her just why it’s a bad idea to try to fix what he’s broken, but she doesn’t really listen to him any longer. Instead, she listens to that misbegotten thing that he and John brought back to the city two years ago.

Rodney shudders, realizes that Sheppard should have answered him too many seconds ago, that maybe he’s wondering about the gate and why it no longer activates, and God, has Rodney finally blown it? Has he finally caught its attention the way everyone else did? Is he going to turn into —

“Come on, Rodney,” Sheppard says finally. “It’s not like the gate works anymore. He’ll be fine.” He bends down to pick it up, tickle its belly. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Ben?”

And Ben, after a giggle that would have most people convinced they were looking at a standard-issue two-year-old child, glances up and gives Rodney a speculative look. It’s not the kind of look Rodney ever wants to see on a child’s face, and certainly not a child of that age. But he’s had to deal with a lot of things he never wanted, including the suicides of too many people, with Elizabeth and Carson the most recent. He’s had to deal with seeing John’s personality slowly disappear into a haze of mindless devotion, and he’s had to find new and interesting ways to mix antidepressants and antipsychotics so he doesn’t lose his own mind like everyone else has. He’s had to look at the thing in Sheppard’s arms (the thing that has his eyes and John’s ears) and realize that he had it right from the very start: it isn’t a child, it’s an alien spawn, a demon child. Worse, it’s an alien demon with a mission, and the only way Rodney can fight back is to kill his own mission, and maybe, in doing so, he can kill the thing that’s taken away his life.

Maybe.

Or maybe not. Either way, he’ll deal. As long as the gate stays inactive, and as long as the thing in Sheppard’s arms can never get to Earth, Rodney will deal.


End file.
